Impasto is paint laid on so thickly that it stands up from the surface of the canvas. Instead of being spread flat, it keeps the shape of the tool that put it there, the ridges of a brush or the flat smear of a knife, so that the marks can be seen and felt. Vincent van Gogh is the painter best known for it, in pictures such as The Starry Night.
The word is Italian. It comes from impastare, "to put into paste," from pasta, "paste" or "dough," and it entered English in 1784 as a term for laying colors on thickly. Thick oil paint does have roughly the texture of a paste, firm enough to be pushed, piled and shaped like clay.
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The technique is much older than Van Gogh. It first becomes noticeable in Venice in the sixteenth century, in the work of Titian and Tintoretto, and one of the first writers to describe it felt he had to explain why a rough surface was not a sign of haste.
In 1566, the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari visited Titian in Venice. The old man was still at work, brushes in hand. In the life of Titian that he published two years later, Vasari compared two ways of painting. Titian's early pictures, he wrote, could be seen "both from near and from a distance." His late ones were "dashed off with a broad and even coarse sweep of the brush, insomuch that from near little can be seen, but from a distance they appear perfect."
What You'll Discover
Why Vasari defended Titian's rough surfaces.
Why thick paint catches light differently.
What Rembrandt did with the end of his brush.
What Van Gogh told his brother about thick paint.
Why impasto cracks.
The painting that weighs more than a ton.